PopTech! 2007: Social Innovation Accelerator

In news about super cool conferences that I miss, NextBillion reports that the folks in Camden have launched a Social Innovation Accelerator.

Their website offers the following criteria, and will start with a software for HIV+ patients called LifeWindows.

The Accelerator evaluates projects which:

• Embody a highly-differentiated, innovative, multi-disciplinary and potentially world-changing approach to a consequential global problems
• Will benefit from the unique skills of the Pop!Tech network
• Have a high multiple of impact
• Amplify the skill-sets of the social innovators involved in doing the work
• Leverage a “bottom up” or extensible community of participants (through open-source licensing, for example)
• Engage the intended community’s participation in the solution
• Have a clear path to becoming a functioning enterprise
• Can be completed in 24-36 months

Sounds like a great concept following other notable efforts, we'll be following them closely to see what other initiatives they hatch.

Hat tip to NextBillion

More at PopTech! 2007

Have Loctite, Will Fix Tooth (Will not drill!)

(This one is so awesome that I'm going to post it Spanish, too)

This a real salute to all those bathroom surgeons and backyard mechanic trauma specialists, innovators of things like gasoline, the ultimate sterilizer, and alcohol swabs that go beyond the call of duty.

According to the WSJ, a group of maverick doctors in Bethlemen, PA, treated emergency room patients with acute tooth pain (I-haven't-been-to-the-dentists-in-months-pain-and-now-it-really-hurts-like-hell pain) not with fancy lasers, or ultrasound, or drills, but with superglue!

Okay, so you can't get it at Home Depot, because they don't sell Dermabond. However, the wound closure agent marketed by J&J is a close cousin of superglue and Krazy Glue. They share the key ingredient cyanoacrylate which performs the sticky magic.

...the only thing ER docs can usually do on the spot for patients with dental pain is to give them antibiotics and pain pills, which take hours to work and can be debilitating. He called Dermabond “superior to anything we can provide.”

Because it dries so fast, Dermabond doesn’t present a hazard, Hill said. But it’s only a temporary fix, until a patient can see a dentist. It falls out on its own in a few days. That may be a problem for some people, who wind up in the ER in the first place because they don’t have dental insurance and can’t afford to see the dentist.

More at WSJ

MacArthur "Genius" Grants Announced

A great list of luminaries have been awarded the latest round of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Genius grants. Among them, Saul Griffith, co-founder of Squid Labs, Yoky Matsuoka, a developer of advanced prosthetics at the University of Washington, and others. The full list is available at their site. Congratulations!

ForSE 2007: Forum for Social Entrepreneurs

From our friends at TiE

ForSE 2007: Forum for Social Entrepreneurs

November 02, 2007
In partnership with TiE Boston and Desphande Foundation

OVERVIEW

Friday, November 2, 2007
11:30am - 7:15pm
Boston University School of Management
Executive Leadership Center, 4th Floor
595 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215

ForSE 2007 is the first conference dedicated to building a dynamic network of leading entrepreneurs, concerned professionals, investors, and thought-leaders dedicated to social impact. Join us for this inaugural event as we launch a new era in Boston's social venture community.

Add RF into to your next Little Device That Could

We're all about radio controlled syringes and to help us out, Make Magazine has an excellent little crash course on embedded radio controls into projects. Check it out at Makezine

Syringe disposal solution in a soda can

The above design was one of this year's INDEX award winners. The idea is simple and is aimed at helping mass vaccination operations run smoothly by ensuring adequate sharp disposal.

More at Core77

IDDS featured in the NYTimes

MIT's IDDS was featured in the Nwe York Times today! Great job everyone!

For those who aren't aware yet, IDDS was a month long event bringing students from around the world in to work on developing world technologies. The result was a fascinating array of projects that included better greenhouse systems, patient tracking systems, and clean water solutions!

The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr. Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a “design revolution” — a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world’s poorest places.

“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,” Ms. Smith said. “The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”

She added: “There are several different places where that revolution has to take place. We started thinking, ‘How do we train engineers so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering they’d want to pursue?’ ”

More at NYTimes

The Tricorder has arrived (sorta)

Trauma is responsible for about 15% of the global burden of disease according to the WHO. Doctors in Seattle are beginning to play around with a device they might have first seen in Star Trek. Just like the tricorder, the device is being used to stop internal bleeding in the lung area.

In this case, lenses focus the high-intensity ultrasound beams at a particular spot inside the body on the patient's lungs. Focusing the ultrasound beams, in a process similar to focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass, creates a tiny but extremely hot spot about the size and shape of a grain of rice. The rays heat the blood cells until they form a seal. Meanwhile the tissue between the device and the spot being treated does not get hot, as it would with a laser beam.

"You can penetrate deep into the body and deliver the energy to the bleeding very accurately," Vaezy said. Recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes. More than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published this summer in the Journal of Trauma.

The research is funded by the NIH and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. We could see one of these tools attached to the end of a robotic arm operating remotely using pre-programmed procedures to save George Jetson.

More at Science Daily

PolyTherics makes generics using fancy molecular footwork

I covered this a while back and Business 2.0 has landed an interview with Dr. Sunil Shaunak, developer of a system to modify the molecular structure of a drug to produce a generic counterpart.

His attitude is certainly very much in line with our beliefs

"What you conventionally do, at the moment, is you make the medicine and test it in Europe and North America, where you have high profit margins, and as prices come down it eventually becomes available in poorer parts of the world," he says. "We've turned the model upside down and said, 'Let's make it available first to the masses and then optimize what we've learned for the rich.'"

The patent liability issues are still out there it will be interesting how his company, Polytherics, navigates the litigation.

Fold your own asthma spacer

Via Medgaget:

The Make blog reports the folks at Stanford's Design School and their School of Medicine have made a simple paper spacer for asthmatics. I'd heard of cola cola bottle spacers before, where you simply cut out the end of a cola bottle and use it as a spacer for your inhaler. The paper based sounds even better.

The project was introduced as one of Ashoka's Disruptive Innovations in Healthcare.

The fact that they use origami to do this, makes it pretty neat. I am curious how they got around to the problem of avoiding static cling to prevent the aerosol particle from sticking to the walls.

More at Medgadget

The Idea Generator

Are you stuck trying to find your next design....give this a try


Link at Idea Generator

Oral-lyn: Insulin inhaler

Everyone has heard of Exhubera by now and its huge dry powder inhaler. Other companies are working in similar systems. Oral-lyn is being developed by Generex and comes in an asthma inhaler form factor. It is mist as opposed to a dry powder, which makes it easier to inhale for most people.

You can buy it Ecuador! Yay!

More at Medgadget

Charmr: Great design arrives for diabetic patients

This a great video about a new type of insulin pump. Great industrial design is combined with smart features. Check out the video.



Hat tip to Medgadget

Back in business

We have a stack of posts ready to be released! It's moving season in Boston...

Credit Card tool

Credit card-sized tools are really neat. Brookstone sells a variety of them, but this one, made by BCB Survival USA includes a few thins that others lack such as a butterfly screw wrench, and a 4 position wrench. Wouldn't it be neat to talk to doctors and healthcare workers to find out what their dream credit card sized tool would be? It's cut plastic or metal, which would make fabrication real easy...let me know please.

Some ideas but again, open to suggestions:
- thermometer
- medicut scissor
- epi dispensers

More at Cool Tools

Microinsurance contest

Microinsurance is a very interesting concept. I particularly like the notion that a farmer, for instance, can insure his working hand, for very little money. I know, I know, it's not the total healthcare solution, etc...but still.

There is a competition with a €1000 purse for an idea to communicate what microinsurance is effectively. Nextbillion describes the rules

As (micro) health insurance is difficult to explain, the MIA invites proposals for innovative, intuitive and original ideas to explain the value proposition of health insurance for poor people and grassroots groups. Proposals could include good stories, anecdotes, games, simulations, picture-stories, scripts for video clips or short movies and the like, to explain insurance to persons with no prior insurance experience.

So break out your short stories, claymation, graphic facilitation tools, videos, and give it shot!

more at Nextbillion